The Genesis of Justice Read Online Free Page A

evidence of our senses, then we must search for a hidden meaning. This is so because intelligence
     is the basis of the Torah. The Torah was not given to ignoramuses.” 24
    Pope John Paul II has made a similar point:
    Fundamentalism also places undue stress upon the inerrancy of certain details in the biblical texts, especially in what concerns
     historical events or supposedly scientific truth. It often historicizes material which from the start never claimed to be
     historical. It considers historical everything that is reported or recounted with verbs in the past tense, failing to take
     the necessary account of the possibility of symbolic or figurative meaning….
    Fundamentalism likewise tends to adopt very narrow points of view. It accepts the literal reality of an ancient, out-of-date
     cosmology, simply because it is found expressed in the Bible; this blocks any dialogue with a broader way of seeing the relationship
     between culture and faith. Its relying upon a non-critical reading of certain texts of the Bible serves to reinforce political
     ideas and social attitudes that are marked by prejudices—racism, for example—quite contrary to the Christian gospel. 25
    I am reminded of a Jewish story about the two great rabbis, both experts on Maimonides, who die and go to heaven, where they
     continue to argue about an inconsistency between one Maimonidian text and another. Each rabbi proposes brilliant arguments
     and counterarguments, seeking to reconcile the apparent conflict. God, observing their marvelous debate, brings in Maimonides
     himself to resolve the conflict. Maimonides looks at the conflicting texts, smiles, and declares that one of them is a simple
     transcription error. There is no actual inconsistency! The rabbis dismiss Maimonides, complaining that
his
solution is far less interesting than their own.
    It is in the argumentative tradition of these rabbis that I approach the text of Genesis. I am certain that some of the conflicts
     within the text of Genesis—for example, Abraham’s willingness to argue with God on behalf of the mostly guilty Sodomites as
     contrasted with his unwillingness to argue with God on behalf of his own entirely innocent son—could be resolved by pointing
     to evidence that one of these texts was written by the “J author,” while the other was written by the “E author.” 26 That is a less interesting answer, however, than some of those provided by the traditional commentators. Because I want to
     engage the commentators and the text on the terms accepted by their readers over the millennia, I have not written a book
     about
who
wrote the Bible, but rather about
how
we should understand its often conflicting messages about justice.
    The open-textured, often ambiguous nature of the Jewish Bible has fostered a rich oral tradition and thousands of commentaries
     on the biblical text. Within the Jewish tradition there are different kinds of biblical commentary:
pshat
, literal translation;
drash
, rabbinic explication;
remez
, symbolic interpretation; and
sod
, secret or mystical meaning. Jews love acronyms, and the acronym for these different kinds of biblical commentary is
pardes (pshat, remez, drash
, and
sod)
, which means “orchard.” The orchard of interpretation is supposed to contain the many faces of the Torah. 27 Perhaps the most popular form of biblical commentary has been the midrashic Aggadah, which are stories, sometimes farfetched,
     elaborating on the biblical narrative and going beyond more text-centered
drash
. I will provide examples of such stories throughout this book. 28 One commentator went so far as to elevate the Aggadic stories to the status of Holy Writ: “If thou wishest to know Him, …
     learn Aggadah.” 29
    To complicate matters even further, some contemporary commentators—most notably Abraham Joshua Heschel—argue that the Bible
     itself is midrash. Heschel regards the central event of biblical theology—the revelation at Sinai—as